At night, a distant streetlamp seems motionless, but if you walk closer and look carefully, you might notice it swaying slightly in the wind. That's roughly how astronomers hunt for planets around other stars: they measure how a star shifts ever so slightly under the gravitational tug of its invisible companions.

In the new study, researchers took 176 stars known to host dusty disks — leftover building material from which planets might have formed. These disks often hint that large bodies are nearby, clearing their paths. But the planets themselves are nearly impossible to see directly: they're too faint, lost in the glare of their star. So the authors turned to data from the Gaia space telescope, which measures stellar positions with incredible precision, as if you could spot a coin on the Moon from Earth.

Comparing these 176 stars with known planetary systems, the scientists singled out several candidates that most likely host massive planets. These stars will become prime targets for future observations when the next Gaia catalog with even more precise data is released. Then, perhaps, we'll see not just the swaying of the lamp, but also the shadow of the invisible hand that rocks it.